Description:

The recent U.S. presidential election has laid bare the extent to which lies and truth, fact and opinion, are hotly contested and highly malleable discursive categories. When did this begin, how may we explain it, and where may we locate this cultural phenomenon in time and space? Do we see these same patterns in Latin American cultural production and discourse, for example? This talk will explore the crisis of facticity as a progressive unmooring of rational knowledge from the eighteenth-nineteenth independence era forward, with an analytical focus on U.S. and Latin American cultural production to evidence what I argue we should understand as an epistemological shift accompanying the global advent of free-market capitalism.